The Pirate Bay now in the cloud

According to TorrentFreak, the filesharing news site, The Pirate Bay has now taken some major steps towards becoming secured from police raids and MPAA intervention.

The Pirate Bay has made an important change to its infrastructure. The world’s most famous BitTorrent site has switched its entire operation to the cloud. From now on The Pirate Bay will serve its users from several cloud hosting providers scattered around the world. The move will cut costs, ensure better uptime, and make the site virtually invulnerable to police raids — all while keeping user data secure.

The Pirate Bay is loved by millions of file-sharers but is also a thorn in the side of the entertainment industries. The latter group continues to push authorities to take action against the site. The Pirate Bay was raided back in 2006 and there are rumors that the police might try again in the near future.

The Pirate Bay is not oblivious to this looming threat. They have backups in place and are shielding the true location of their servers. Nevertheless, should the site lose all its servers it might take a while to get back online. This is one of the reasons why The Pirate Bay decided to move the site into the cloud yesterday. The switch resulted in five minutes downtime and was hardly noticed by the public, but it’s a big change for the infamous BitTorrent site.

Hosting in the cloud also makes the site easier to scale, it reduces downtime, and is also cheaper. “Moving to the cloud lets TPB move from country to country, crossing borders seamlessly without downtime. All the servers don’t even have to be hosted with the same provider, or even on the same continent,” The Pirate Bay told TorrentFreak. The Pirate Bay is currently hosted at cloud hosting companies in two countries where they run several Virtual Machine (VM) instances. “Running on VMs cuts down operation costs and complexity. For example, we never need anyone to do hands-on work like earlier this month when we were down for two days because someone had to fix a broken power distribution unit,” The Pirate Bay says.

The setup also makes it possible for the BitTorrent site to take their business elsewhere without too much hassle. “If one cloud-provider cuts us off, goes offline or goes bankrupt, we can just buy new virtual servers from the next provider. Then we only have to upload the VM-images and reconfigure the load-balancer to get the site up and running again.”

While most of Pirate Bay’s former servers are now obsolete, not everything was moved to the cloud. The load balancer and transit-routers are still owned and operated by The Pirate Bay, which allows the site to hide the location of the cloud provider. It also helps to secure the privacy of the site’s users.

The hosting providers have no idea that they’re hosting The Pirate Bay, and even in the event they found out it would be impossible for them to gather data on the users. “All communication with users goes through TPB’s load balancer, which is a disk-less server with all the configuration in RAM. The load balancer is not in the same country as the transit-router or the cloud servers,” The Pirate Bay told us. “The communication between the load balancer and the virtual servers is encrypted. So even if a cloud provider found out they’re running TPB, they can’t look at the content of user traffic or user’s IP-addresses.” In addition The Pirate Bay now believes it’s more raid proof.

The worst case scenario is that The Pirate Bay loses both its transit router and its load balancer. All the important data is backed up externally on VMs that can be re-installed at cloud hosting providers anywhere in the world. “If the police decide to raid us again there are no servers to take, just a transit router. If they follow the trail to the next country and find the load balancer, there is just a disk-less server there. In case they find out where the cloud provider is, all they can get are encrypted disk-images,” The Pirate Bay says. “They have to be quick about it too, if the servers have been out of communication with the load balancer for 8 hours they automatically shut down. When the servers are booted up, access is only granted to those who have the encryption password,” they add.

For Pirate Bay users the move to the cloud doesn’t change much though. If anything, they will notice significantly less downtime.

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This blog is written by a media pirate, Long John Silver, and is published by an independent publisher to protect the identity of the pirate. If the blog is abruptly deleted, it has been killed by the host, the police or the media industry.